Lottery tickets are well known and widely sold and typically comprised of a sheet material of paper or card stock on which is printed lottery information and various indicia for the playing of one or more games. Many such games are instant win type games where the player can play the game or games by carrying out various functions, for example, opening pull tabs on a break-open ticket. Such tickets are also known variously as pull-tabs, pickle cards, jar tickets, hard cards and charitable gaming tickets.
In U.S. Pat. No. 6,234,477 assigned to the present assignee and issued May 22, 2001 is disclosed a construction of lottery ticket which utilizes variable image printing techniques in combination with lamination of two substrate sheets together to form what is initially a common pouch construction with the game indicia on the inside surface where the sheets can be separated, each from the other, to form in effect two separate tickets.
In U.S. Pat. No. 7,472,926 assigned to the present assignee and issued Jan. 6, 2009 is disclosed a game ticket construction formed by laminating two substrate sheets by a band of adhesive between the sheets across a center line so as to form an initially flat construction which can be folded into a four page eight surface booklet. A plurality of different games, each defined by game indicia some or all of which are covered by a scratch-off layer are printed, one onto each of the six surfaces except the first and last which carry promotional material.
Instant ticket games typically utilize an opaque scratch-off over printed game data so that the player can remove the scratch-off to expose the game data to allow the player to determine from the data whether the game data satisfies the criteria of the game to be a winning ticket and if so how much is the prize value. Attention has been given over many years to try to improve the play action for the player to try to remove the impression that the game is merely pre-determined. Many new game formats have been developed to this effect.
Some games also use a translucent scratch-off material to mark the game play area of the ticket, for example in a bingo or cross-word format, by the player removing the translucent scratch-off from covered data so that the marked data where the scratch-off is removed has a different color appearance from that which has not been removed. However the game still relies on game play data which is covered by an opaque scratch-off layer to be exposed and played on the game play area.